How to make an index for your book or dissertation

The index is the elder sibling of the glossary, who has grown up, moved to the big city and started doing drugs. Anyone who has been asked to write one will tremble a little in their boots, at least the first time. Basically, an index is a quick look up list of terms that appear in your dissertation or book. In a similar way to the glossary, an index serves a rhetorical as well as a communicative role by throwing a spotlight on the parts of your book that will be most interesting and useful to the reader.

Indexing is an even more labourious process than making a glossary, but the return on investment is definitely worth it. Beyond the academic examination context, a good index is a vital tool in convincing a reader whether or not to read (or buy) your book. How often have you flipped to the index of the book to see if there’s enough on the topic you are interested in to warrant the effort? That’s right – almost every time.

Until this book, only Inger had experience of writing an index and she did a pretty horrible job of it. Here is what she learned.

Step one: Develop some useful themes

To begin, you need to think about why a reader might want to buy or read your book in the first place. You are not writing a novel, so being practical is not a bad place to start.As a thought exercise, try to think about the kind of problems that your readers are looking to solve. Think of words or phrases to represent these problems and you have a rough list of themes.

Inger’s previous book “How to be an academic” was a practical guide to surviving in academia, especially if you are a precariously employed academic. She started by generating a list of things like “making money”, “dealing with assholes”, “writing quickly” and so on. She then tried to think about the themes she thought were important, to give the index reader a sense of the broad range of topics in the book. This generated terms like “networking”. These themes guided the next step: identifying the areas of text where these themes were discussed.

Step Two: find the chunks of text that relate to the themes

The next step is the absolute worst part of the whole process, so prepare yourself. To get to a list-y looking thing, one must read a text that one is incredibly sick of reading by now with a forensic eye. The purpose of this step is to take note of the various manifestations of your themes in the book and make a note of their location. DO NOT DO THIS UNTIL YOU HAVE PRINTER READY TEXT.

Each time you find that theme in chunk of text, think about a short word or phrase that might relate to that theme and note the page number. Inger’s first pass looked something like this:

Academic

Acronyms, value of 124 – 125

Arrogance 50 – 55

‘Backstage work’ 226, 236

Bookshelves 306

Cleverness 46, 49, 250 – 251, 255 – 257

Cultural Capital 46 – 47, 89 – 90, 245

Dinner Parties 56, 60, 64

Competition 260

Fashion 85 – 90, 306

Gift economies 253 – 254

Hiring practices 62, 229 – 236

Love of the work 18, 76, 264, 288 – 291

Migrants 56 – 60

Salaries 31, 222

‘service’ 101

The new normal 39, 229, 231

Academia as a Bad Boyfriend 16 – 19, 32 – 33, 36, 231

Academic journals, questionable practices of 156 – 162

Academic hunger games 13, 229

ADHD 67

Amabile, Tessa 46

Aaron, Rachael 198

Architecture as a profession 28, 218

Baby Boomers 283

Becker, Howard 125, 153 – 154, 193, 195 – 196

Bullying 52, 54 – 55

Blogging and social media

The purpose of the Thesis Whisperer blog 9

Time implications of blogging 12, 177

Starting blogging 22

Mark’s simple rules of blogging 38

Safe Spaces? 48, 267

Writing posts 82, 263 – 264

Value of sharing for your career 112, 220, 303 – 304

As open access publishing 154, 159, 220 – 222

Enjoyment 256, 263

Mainstream media shit storms 268 – 269

Social media shit storm 284 – 285

At a certain point in making this list, Inger gave up trying to keep it tidy and started using Nvivo, a text analysis software. This worked well, but she doesn’t recommend using this software unless you have the skills; there’s a big learning curve and you have a book to deliver.

Step Three: throw out the themes

When Inger’s publisher got this index, carefully compiled over a couple of weekends, she smiled kindly, thanked Inger for the effort and gave it straight to a professional. When it came back, it looked completely different. In Inger’s version, dinner parties appeared under the theme of ‘academic’: a vague sort of category, in the final version it appeared under D, you know – for dinner party.

The lesson? When you are generating an alphabetical list, it’s best to bear in mind the alphabet. Inger was close, she just needed to throw away the themes and arrange the list of key words in alphabetical order. The final touch would be to try to think of words that are related to each other and put “see also” under them.

Job done, no drugs necessary. Except, maybe – coffee.

This is how I did an index, but I’m sure there are more elegant and sophisticated techniques. Have you ever done one? Do you have tricks to share? Love to hear about them in the comments!